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Recent research from Washington University in St. Louis shows something many of us in rural America have felt for decades now. Anger moves people more than fear. It is anger, not fear, that changes minds, changes their political party and drives politics.
Look back to 1980s. Rural America began losing the foundation it was built on. Agriculture, forestry, manufacturing, and mining started fading. Each decade brought more shuttered plants, more empty storefronts, and fewer family farms. Schools consolidated. Hospitals closed. Young people left for work and never came back.
By the early 2000s, when the first oval Friends of Coal stickers appeared on pickup trucks and hard hats, it struck a deep nerve. Folks were angry, not just at job loss, but at what it represented. It was the feeling of being forgotten.
All along the Appalachian spine from Pennsylvania to Alabama, Friends of Coal turned once Union Blue Democratic strongholds into MAGA Red territory. For generations, these hills voted for the party of working people, the party of FDR, the party that fought for coal miners’ rights, safer mines, and fair wages. Then, with one simple slogan and a black and white sticker, the story flipped. Coal was no longer just a job, it became an identity. Anyone who questioned the industry was painted as an enemy of the working man.
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The campaign told a story that felt true. “They took it from us.” They meaning liberal Democrats, environmentalists, urban elites (thinking they need to educate us poor rural folk) and anyone tied to government regulation. That message stuck because it matched the pain people saw every day driving past former dairy farms, darkened coal tipples, empty Main Streets and closed down tobacco warehouses.
Then came 2016. Make America Great Again did not introduce something new to rural Appalachia. It poured gasoline on what was already smoldering. It offered a simple story to explain decades of loss and frustration. Rural America did not turn angry overnight. That anger had been growing since the Dairy Buy-Out of the 80s, since sawmills cut their last log, since small town factories shipped their jobs overseas as a result of NAFTA of the late 90s. Since the first tobacco warehouses closed from the Tobacco Buy-Out of the early 2000s. Not to mention since the opioid epidemic of the 2010s. All the while urban politicians took campaign donations from ‘Big Pharma’!
While cities grew, rural America watched its kids leave, its schools close, its neighborhoods crumble, and its way of life fade. The anger came from love. Love for home, for work that mattered, for communities that once thrived.
What this new study tells us is what we already knew deep down. Anger makes people act. It makes them choose sides, put a sticker on a bumper, or cast a vote just to be HEARD. The challenge now is whether that anger can be turned toward rebuilding instead of blaming, toward making something new instead of mourning what is gone.
Rural America has every reason to be angry. The question is what we do with it.
Be curious, not judgmental.
Till next time, that’s the story from the ‘Back Forty’. — John W. Peace II
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John W. Peace II is a fifth-generation farmer from Big Stone Gap, Virginia, where he grew up on his family’s dairy, Clinch Haven Farms, and still lives today. He’s a proud father to Trey and Shelby Peace, and partner in life to Cathy Swinney. A Virginia Tech graduate with graduate studies at Penn State, he served as the youngest Chair of the Wise County Board of Supervisors (2004–2008). John co-owns urTOPIX LLC (urTopixLLC.com), a Democratic campaign training firm focused on reaching rural voters that is sponsored by www.RuralAmericaRising.com PAC. He’s also a two-time Amazon bestselling author. Learn more at www.JohnWPeace.com.
Contact: https://linktr.ee/JohnWPeace
